Pete Welding

Sério.

Histórico. Em encarte da versão cd (1991) de meu “In the Wee Small Hours” (1955).

Trecho, por Pete Welding:

“When Sinatra joined Capitol Records in the spring of 1953, the long-play record was just beginning to come into its own. Although it had been introduced as early as 1948, it took the LP some years to establish itself with the record-buying public as an alternative to the 78 and 45-rpm single. By the early 1950s, however, the LP’s convenience and superior sound quality had been widely recognized, production of LPs and the phonographs on which to play them were accelerating at ever increasing rates, and ‘high fidelity’, as it was then termed, was beginning to gather momentum.

At first, LPs simply were viewed as single-disc substitutes for the bulky, inconvenient album in which anywhere from three to six single recordings by a performer had been packaged. (The term ‘album’ to describe the LP was in fact a holdover from the days of these repackaged singles.) And like the albums they replaced, LPs generally were little more than randomly compiled collections of hits by performers of the day.

Sinatra, however, changed all this. Recognizing the real potential of the LP both in terms of allowing performances to be extended beyond the time limitations of the conventional single recording, as well in conveying a consistent, uniform emotional mood, Sinatra and his producers reassessed the recording process and began working towards the production of albums that were true, complete musical entities in themselves, linked by shared or similar emotional and thematic consistencies among the songs comprising the LP“.